Man the battlements! Archers to the walls! Once more into the Breech,
Lads! Its Castle building mania in the Middle Ages! It’s Stronghold
2!

I’ve been a big fan of Stronghold since the original oh so
not-so-long ago. For me, few things could beat out throwing hundreds
of little bit-map electronic people with little electronic sticks
and swords at towering bit-map stone walls. I got started with medieval
strategy with the most excellent Lords of the Realm II, and Stronghold
was like Lords adapted to real-time with the ability to build my own
castles. So when I found out that Firefly Studios was following up
Stronghold (and the stand-alone expansion Stronghold: Crusader) with
a sequel, I anxiously followed its development.

This is also the first game which I did not purchase from a physical
store location. Thinking I could get a jump on the action, I “pre-ordered”
my game from a well-known on-line company. I don’t think I’ll
be doing that with any games in the future, and will go back to physically
going to the store. But I did get a “free bonus map” for
the game.

The game ships on two CDs in those oh-so-annoying little white paper
sleeves. I prefer jewel cases, but I won’t hold their absence
against a game. Disk 1 is strictly installation, while Disk 2 is used
to finish up installation and for playing the game. They’re
even labeled “Disk 1: Installation” and “Disk 2:
Play.” So, I installed the game and fired ‘er up. The
system requirements are a little steep in comparison to some other
games, but any modern computer should run it just fine. The first
time you play, it automatically opens the external config utility
for setting the graphics. A nice, and getting more common, feature,
and theirs even has a “recommended” button for quick optimization.

Now on to the really important stuff: the game itself. For those
of you who’ve played the originals Stronghold and Stronghold:
Crusader, you’ll be right at home. After the nifty little opening
animation, which sets the mood but lacks the tongue-in-cheek of the
opening to Stronghold 1, the main shell is pretty smooth and easy
to navigate. However, in the current build, there are no “tooltips”
to tell you what some of the more cryptic buttons do in, say, the
setup menu for “Kingmaker.” This is annoying, and the
otherwise excellent manual (I’m a fan of big manuals) falters
a touch here. In general, you have two play options: the ‘Path
of Peace” and the “Path of War.” “Path of
Peace” lead you to Free-build mode (build your castle with only
rabbits and wolves to contend with) and the Economic campaign (where
your mission objectives are stuff like “produce 100 swords before
the timer runs out” or in the first mission “construct
a beacon so ships stop bashing themselves against the rocks.”
This is the total “Sim Castle” part of the game. The “Path
of War” leads you to the main Campaign, Kingbuilder, and Siege
modes, where the objectives are quite a bit more violent.

The main campaign now features fully-animated cutscenes supplemented
by scripted-action in-game cutscenes. The cast of characters has grown
from the original, and the plotline now has more intrigue and direct
interaction of the characters. Instead of playing the name-less, face-less,
voice-less, generic “young lord” of the original, you
now play the part of Mathew Steele, a squire to the raven-haired Sir
William (a.k.a., the guy on the cover). To introduce the characters,
when they appear for the first time, the camera stops and does a sort
of “Coyote and Roadrunner” routine telling their name
and their nickname (“The Hammer,” “The Lamb,”
“An English Traitor,” “The Bull” etc.). The
campaign is broken into “Chapters” with each chapter containing
multiple missions. One interesting thing is that the missions within
a chapter are persistent—you start mission 2 with the castle
in the exact condition you left it at the end of mission 1. You can
save the game at any point, but there is only an autosave function
between chapters. This is possibly one of the most annoying problems
with the game. If you’re only going to play through part of
a chapter, you have to start the next mission then save manually.

Gameplay is pretty much identical to the original, with a stockpile,
and definite resource and production trees. There are some new resource
trees, and several new buildings. Their much-touted new Honor system
is a nice addition, but is ultimately just another resource. The new
Kingmaker mode of play is nothing more than a traditional “Skirmish
mode.” The change comes in that now the map is broken up into
territories, and if you own another territory, it will earn you some
extra gold and every now and then send an ox-cart with some goods
to your castle. This is especially important on cramped maps, as it
allows you to “outsource” certain areas of production.
Control of the territories, especially in multiplayer (kingmaker with
other humans), can become important, as it gives you actual land to
fight for control over.

The map editor is good. It is easy to create a good-looking map pretty
quickly. Unfortunately, you can only make maps for “kingmaker,”
“peaceful missions,” “war missions,” and “free
build.” There is no default “Siege” map which was
my all-time favorite part of the original Stronghold and is sorely
missed. Technically, it is possible to do a siege by building a War
map with an invasion scripted in, but I (and many of the online community)
have had little luck in getting this to work correctly. I myself managed
to get a bunch of troops to invade, but they never attacked my castle.
They just stood there out-of-range. There are also some nasty little
bugs. The patch (which came out 2 days after the release) fixes some
of these, but not all. Online forums are full of requests for bug
fixes and little gameplay tweaks (like some way to block off wall
portions so if an enemy gains control of your outer wall, they don’t
gain access to your entire wall). Multiplayer is a mess right now.
There is no way to password-protect your games, little in the way
of search functions, and I’ve heard reports that the Kick feature
doesn’t always work.

Graphic-wise, this is a dramatic improvement over the original. The
game has gone completely 3D, and though the default camera is in basic
isometric view (actually a good thing) but you can take control of
the camera more fully to get a nice, pretty view of a sheep grazing,
an Archer taking aim, or the Lady bathing (I am not kidding—but
don’t worry, you can’t “see” anything). In
the original Stronghold, when some buildings were in operation, the
roof “cut-away” to show the person working inside. With
the new engine, Stronghold 2 lets you see into every habitable building
from the lowly hovel to the Inn, to the Great Hall in the Keep. This
also means that towers in the game now have interiors, and that enemies
can now fight for control of the inside of a tower, and attackers
must make their way up the stairs to get to the units on top. This
is, possibly, my favorite new addition. Most of the characters have
quite some detail (though some of the mercenary units look a tad unfinished),
and everything just looks spectacular. Even the fire looks better.
I’ve noticed that the animations for some of the units in the
game have improved as well. For example, in Stronghold 1, the swordsmen
had a set “attack animation” of “high chop, thrust,
repeat.” The swordsmen in Stronghold 2 will randomly select
one of a battery of animations and perform it, meaning any given swordsman
might do a high chop, followed by a kick, then push his shield out
and away while executing a horizontal cut while passing forward. Its
pretty cool to watch, but is hampered by two things: clipping (you
can cram as many units as you want into a single space, and your men
will pass through each other) and lack of unit interaction (when doing
some of the fancier animations, a unit may walk through his adversary,
while the adversary does not react to the action). These are not debilitating,
and are holdovers from the game’s predecessors, so they can
slide. Destruction is also way cooler now. Destroyed buildings implode
in a jumble of rock and wood. Stone walls shatter as catapult projectiles
smash into them. Units (friendly or enemy) unfortunate enough to be
standing around where a catapult’s rock falls are blown into
the air (I chuckle with glee every time my catapults lands a rock
in the middle of an advancing column, scattering half of them around
and breaking up their advance).

One of the best parts of the original Stronghold was the sound. Each
character was voiced, and even the peasants would express their views.
The sound was rich and vibrant, and often humorous, while the music
was simply excellent. The developers went over the top with the sounds
in this one. Not only did they keep some of the better dialog from
the original, but they added much, much more. The voice acting is
much improved with much more emotion and feeling. The sounds are of
much higher quality now, with better fidelity, especially in the music
(of which the old songs have been re-recorded and added to several
new ones). Now, a catapult projectile falling off target and smacking
into the dirt actually sounds cool, instead of just a “thud.”

I know this has been a long and drawn out review, so I’ll wrap
it up here for all of you who don’t like to read long articles:

The Good:
Graphics and animations are much improved
Towers. They now have interiors and arrow loops.
The Sound
The attention to detail
Map editor is powerful (if a tad hard to use)

The Bad:
Buggy. (but a second patch is already in the works)
Multiplayer is a mess
Lack of tooltips or other help for buttons (probably goes under “Buggy”)
Lack of siege option for editor (my personal gripe)
Too few maps for non-campaign play
AI still easy to fool (well, maybe this one isn’t all a bad
thing)

The “Ugly”:
What’s my final verdict? I think they rushed it. I don’t
know why they would have wanted to rush to market. There’s no
major gift-giving season right around the corner. This game definitely
needed to spend a little more time with the de-buggers and playtesters
a little longer. That said, it’s still a great game. If you
enjoyed the predecessors, you’ll enjoy this. In general, it
is possible to overlook its shortcomings and appreciate the game for
what it is—a castle simulator. It doesn’t have the strategic
depth of, say, Medieval: Total War, but it isn’t supposed to.
With another patch or two, this can be an all-time classic. I would
certainly recommend this game. And in conclusion: it beats the pants
off of Castle Strike.